It’s bad enough when lifelong businessmen propose changes in football that seem to be not in the game’s best interests, but when it’s former players who appear hell-bent on pulling up the drawbridge to make the Champions’ League more of a closed-shop than ever, you begin to despair.

So it was comforting to hear the ex-striker turned executive grandee apparently joining in the nostalgic love-fest that followed Bayern Munich’s visit to Celtic this week. As German journalists enthused over the kind of atmosphere that normally struggles to germinate in all-seater stadia , the Bayern chief reportedly called it, “football in pure culture, like it was in the old days.”

Those would be the old days of egalitarianism, presumably. When the likes of Panathinaikos, St Etienne, Steaua Bucharest, Club Brugge and Nottingham Forest could still dream.

Talk is cheap, Herr Rummenigge, but it’s at least comforting to hear that a little romance lives on inside you. Try and hold that thought.

“There’s no England badge in the picture of them winning the World Cup – for me, that’s wrong. They’ve all turned their shirts around because they want their names across their chests, so everybody across the world can see who they are.

“They’re all saying, ‘I’m a good young player coming through, look at me’, but that in itself is what is wrong with society. In effect, they’re thinking about fame as well as being a footballer and I think it creates a big debate here.

“I thought the way they played was amazing and the way they’ve been coached has been fantastic…We’re talking some amazing talent in that group and the freedom they played with, everybody should be happy to see that in an England shirt, and I am too, I was proud of them. But the England badge not being in that picture says a lot.

“The fact they want their names to be on the front of their shirts and think about getting their name out there so people know who they are – they are not wrong, but it’s what is wrong at the moment.”

Murphy has taken some flak for this, Balls.ie’s Gavin Cooney describing the reaction as “nonsense”, while The Sun‘s Dave Kidd, called it “flawed”, before countering with the tired old ‘nice guys finish nowhere’ chestnut.

Both writers, however, may have been more knee-jerk with their reactions than Murphy was with his. Compared to some of the two-dimensional drivel that occasionally emanates from talkSPORT, his observations are articulated well, whether you agree with them or not, and for Cooney to sneeringly dismiss them as “grand sociological musings” says much for the shallow times in which we live .

Murphy, after all, had the presence of mind to save the key phrase for last: “…they are not wrong, but it’s what is wrong at the moment.”

Precisely. Forget ‘naivety’ or ‘youthful ebullience’; those England teenagers have a far more powerful defence for their post-game actions at the weekend. They didn’t write the rules of this brand-conscious age: they are simply playing the game. Murphy was right to differentiate between those actions and the culture that spawns them.

He beheld a sporting landscape in which business can’t take so much as an afternoon off and where getting lost in the moment is for amateurs. Whether the flip-flopping of shirts idea came from the players themselves or, shall we say, ‘advisers’, the message is out there. Not even the ultimate prize for your age-group is enough now, unless it can be immediately leveraged for self-aggrandisment. Behind the tinsel and whooping, Murphy was old enough to see something hollow and depressing in this. I doubt he’s alone.

And as for The Sun‘s contention that England’s future may be safe in the hands of men more concerned with the name on the back of the shirt than the badge on the front; where exactly have you been for the last 21 years?

The ultimate compliment from one scribe to another: an occasional tribute to nice lines that stood out from the noise…

“In recent times, American culture has become addicted to the adrenaline rush of outrage. Each day, we awake as a nation looking for something to disagree with and get angry about. We don’t even realize what is most obvious: This is sickness. If a family acted this way, it would destroy itself and maximize its own misery. Yet we not only excuse deliberate divisiveness in politics, we ignore it by the gross.” – Thomas Boswell for The Washington Post:At World Series, a racist taunt fuels a stunning episode of civility

It used to make you sound quite learned, trotting out the quote that the only requirement for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. So often is its repetition warranted nowadays, however, that you’re conscious of sounding more like Alan Partridge.

For a start, I think their decision misses the target, so obsessed is modern Britain with how right-on it wants to appear where drugs are concerned. Forget doping; what this decision amounts to is the de-criminalisation of fraud. Cheating the system with a view to financial gain will be off-limits for the rozzers as long as it happens on a tilted playing field.

“None of those interviewed were in favour of criminalisation. Sports bodies believe that their investigations would be affected by criminalisation of doping in sport as it would slow down their own processes. The review found that criminalising the act of doping in sport would not add to combating doping in sport with the provisions that already exist sufficient.”

I’m unconvinced by the ‘slowing-down of processes’ argument, which sounds like just the kind of last-ditch whine most administrators come out with when asked to embrace change. Again, it misses the point. It’s not what factoring in jail-time does to your schedule that matters, but the additional pause for thought that it might give to fraudsters. People (must it be spelt out?) who are contemplating defrauding their sport, those who bankroll it, those who administer it and those who pay through their noses to watch it, either in admission prices or satellite TV subscriptions. All with a view to ill-deserved financial gain.

If we’re going to wave one type of white-collar crook through, tell me why every mortgage con artist or Internet scammer shouldn’t be on the ‘phone to his lawyer this morning, demanding that his custody be terminated.

The closing line of the above quote, though, really takes the biscuit. “…with the provisions that already exist sufficient.”

But of course. Drugs in sport? I don’t know about you but I hardly hear it mentioned these days.

If it didn’t sound so Partridge, I’d be tempted to ask what these people are on.

I believe the excellent football magazine When Saturday Comes still maintains the traditional exclusion of MK Dons from its season preview.

All other Premier and Football League clubs are allocated a capsule covering their prospects but not the Buckinghamshire club, which was infamously formed in 2004, after businessmen decided that a football club is purely about assets, and not at all about location. As Wimbledon FC withered on the vine in south London, plans to relocate it to Dublin condensed into the not so evocative reality of a 70-mile move north to Milton Keynes. With the new home came a new name and colour scheme and Wimbledon’s alter ego was up and running.

If you’re American, this was business as usual for professional sport. If you’re English, on the other hand, it was unprecedented in living memory, alien to the tribalism that underpins our national game and, perhaps most significantly, it opened a door on laterally-mobile franchises that many football people would rather was welded shut forever.

That was what assured MK Dons of a long and rocky road towards acceptance, as manifested by the When Saturday Comes boycott. It wasn’t a desire for revenge on the innocent football lovers of Milton Keynes, but a dread of normalising the intolerable, lest it become fashionable.

And as much as some Dons’ fans like to characterise grudging tolerance of their club as the last lingering rant of old men in end-of-world sandwich boards, the case against ‘Franchise FC’ and its lamentable origins were only given a fresh lick of paint by this week’s goings-on in the United States.

A vote by NFL owners last week means that Las Vegas will have a new American football team in 2019. Only it won’t.

That’s because Las Vegas is getting Oakland’s team. Not because fans of the Oakland Raiders have found that they have better things to do with their autumnal Sundays, but because the Californian city happens to have a mayor with a backbone.

When the Raiders attempted to execute the disgusting shakedown that passes for ‘best practice’ in American pro sports, namely, “Give us untold millions of taxpayers’ money towards a new stadium or we’ll jump town,” Mayor Libby Schaaf asked if they needed help with their packing.

Six hundred miles to the east, alas, civic leaders are made of less formidable stuff. Nevada’s state legislature will donate $750m from civic coffers towards the $1.9bn price tag of the Raiders’ new stadium in Sin City. Hopefully those same leaders will now field calls all day long from voters wanting to know how the state’s generosity squares with Las Vegas’s current schools crisis, caused by – you guessed it – lack of funding.

Two fine articles have been penned here and here, highlighting other economic holes that traditionally riddle these sweetheart deals, like the discrepancy often found between predicted local revenues to be generated by the incoming team and the numbers that actually emerge (the Raiders new stadium will host only eight regular-season games, after all) and the ‘reverse Robin Hood’ scenario that sees public money used to generate profit for private investors.

And all this is before we disregard the financial aspect altogether and consider the simple aesthetics of these city-swaps. It can be hard enough maintaining affinity to a professional football club in Britain when its players change wholesale from one season to the next, yet imagine a league in which clubs themselves become migrants.

By way of analogy, I’d invite those of you with happy marriages, to visualise them having been subject to one small change at the outset – the words “’til death do us part” being replaced with “’til I get a better offer.”

With the best will in the world, I suspect the relationship that followed would have struggled to reach quite the same heights.

So you’ll have to excuse us, MK Dons supporters. It really is nothing personal, but we will never rule a line under the way in which your club came into being. Because we don’t want people getting ideas.

As America shows us, you see, franchise relocation is like smoking: it’s habit-forming and it usually stinks.

It was one of Danny Baker’s finest moments as host of 6.06, showcasing his ability to view life from a tangent that had never even occurred to his callers.

“We’re going down, Danny…” wailed the voice at the other end of the line.

“So?”

“Whaddya mean, so?! We’ve been relegated.”

“So what?” replied Baker. “You’re good enough to come straight back up; you spend a year seeing grounds you’ve never seen before and you pay a whole lot less to watch your football.”

There was a stunned silence. Were the presenter to proffer similar consolation nowadays, he would probably be met with howls of derision, for even I have occasionally swallowed the notion that the gulf between Premier League and The Rest has become so great, that relegation is equivalent to being banished from Heaven to Hades.

That notion has been given a thorough airing in this dreadful week for common decency, with those minded to excuse the sacking of Leicester City manager Claudio Ranieri, 298 days after he delivered a sporting miracle, well aware that they needed to do some fast talking.

So their argument went this way: behind the mists of sentiment lurks an unforgiving precipice over which Leicester City is in grave danger of toppling to its doom, and while mists eventually clear, precipices are going nowhere.

Perhaps because of their desperation to shore up this argument as it ploughed on against the tide, we’ve had to entertain an old obscenity these last few days. Yes, with apologies to Aleppo and a crumbling NHS, the D-word is back in professional sport…

“…obviously they’ve felt that, unless they made a change, there was every chance they would drop out – which would been amazing after winning the title last year. It would be a disaster.” – TalkSport

“I think going down would be a disaster for Leicester and I suppose the board have made a very brave decision” – Leicester Mercury

“…it will be up to the likes of Vardy and Riyad Mahrez…who will have to desperately improve their form if they are to avoid such a disaster.” – GiveMeSport

“It’s a campaign that still possesses the likely possibility of ending in unthinkable disaster.” – The Linc

“They look like they might go down. It’d be a disaster for them if they were relegated.” – Reddit

Interesting view of the word ‘disaster’. They were using it a lot in relation to Tyneside this time last year, if I remember correctly, yet in the absence of news reports to the contrary, we must assume that the sun continues to rise in Newcastle and the birds continue to sing. Certainly, football continues to be played there, we know this because as I write, Newcastle United have 69 points from 32 games and are first in line for promotion to the Premier League.

No exceptional occurrence this, either. Since the formation of the League, 18 of the 73 teams relegated (four went down in 1995 as league sizes were altered) have returned the following season. Seven more have been back within two seasons, two within three, and three within four. A 41 per cent chance of returning to the top table within half a decade is hardly the stuff of unspeakable tragedy.

So, having despatched the ‘disaster’ myth, let’s dig down to what might have really prompted Ranieri’s dismissal. For this, I believe you have to go back to mid-December last year, when Birmingham City’s owners decided that turning a team on its uppers into one a whisker outside the play-off zone with only modest finances wasn’t good enough, and manager Gary Rowett was shown the door. If a previous hardline stance on his own contractual position meant that Rowett had made enemies at St Andrews, as suggested here, the identity of his replacement, Gianfranco Zola, fuelled an alternative theory for Rowett’s departure.

“Birmingham’s owners want a ‘name’ they can boast about at the yacht club,” fumed radio pundit Danny Kelly, “and Gary Rowett isn’t it.”

If it seemed an odd metaphor for a city more than 100 miles from the sea, everyone familiar with Zola’s underwhelming managerial record knew where Kelly was coming from, and an observation from BBC radio’s Pat Murphy on Ranieri’s demise makes me wonder if we are seeing the same vanity at work once more.

“I remember the Thai owners at the Everton game when Leicester got the trophy, the players couldn’t get the trophy out of their hands. They loved dining at the top table and that’s what they are worried about.”

Are we getting to it now, I wonder – the true nature of the perceived ‘disaster’ that has forced the hands holding the dagger? The prospect of a year or two dealing in just millions instead of billions; of having to make do with mere affluence instead of unimaginable riches, while the folks at the Yacht Club find someone else to talk to?

A fairytale trashed on the altar of ego?

A football-daft friend stared at the floor yesterday, as we discussed Ranieri’s departure, slowly shaking his head.

Until about noon today, you may have shared my view that the worst legacy of last night’s FA Cup encounter between Sutton Utd and Arsenal was the visitors forgetting their pennant. Probably more absent-mindedness than ‘snub’ and quickly and grandly redeemed by Theo Walcott’s post-game sportsmanship and his employers’ largesse.

While rules are rules, they are dwarfed by the bigger picture here. The supposed custodians of football – be it the Football Association, Premier League or Football League – tumble into bed with the betting industry, via a string of club and bookmaker sponsorship deals, and we’re now supposed to take them seriously as they get all sniffy about the game’s integrity?

Where was that ethical concern when the colour of money blinded them to the optics of a commercial alliance that will simply never look right? Professional sport and gambling tie-ins are like a vicar and tarts party without the underlying irony, both sides insisting that they can make a go of it.

So forgive me if I don’t join in with the censorious pomposity as football’s new mate bites it in the bum. Not because a goalkeeper flapped suspectly at a cross any six-year-old could have caught, mind you, handing a dodgy win to his opponents, but because he ate a pie in the dugout.

This used to be exactly the kind of stuff that made non-league football what it is, for goodness’ sake: often a damn sight more fun than its senior counterpart. Not any more, alas. The pursuit of excellence is a humourless thing, so where we might once have laughed off a bit of daft japery from some jack-the-lad on the bench, now it’s breast-beating all round, the Sutton manager talking like there’s been a bereavement, the club’s community and disabled teams now forced to look for a new president. And in the background, the promise of an investigation by the FA, its hands grubby with bookmakers’ money.